Whitlam addresses reporters after the dismissal on 11 November 1975.
Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

In response to a heckler who objected to Whitlam’s pro-choice stance

“Let me make quite clear that I am for abortion and, in your case Sir, we should make it retrospective.”

To attorney general Garfield Barwick

“This truculent runt thinks he can get away with anything!”

Upon his dismissal in 1975

“Well may we say ‘God save the Queen’, because nothing will save the governor general.”

On the governor general, Sir John Kerr

“It is the first time the burglar has been appointed as caretaker.”

In response to Sir Winston Turnbull shouting in parliament: “I am a Country member”

“I remember,” replied Whitlam, to applause from both sides of the aisle.

Before implementing the National Sewerage Program

“No other western nation has cities in which the incidence of urban sanitation is so primitive or so ludicrous as in the cities of Australia … We are the most effluent nation in what Liberals call the free world.”

After Malcolm Turnbull apologised for the fog obscuring his Hunter Valley farm

Editorial: The late giant of the Australian left failed to do his constitutional homework. MPs in Britain should learn the lesson, and start swatting up on the smallprint of statutes such as the Fixed-term Parliaments Act